In The Battersea Poltergeist, horror aficionado and star Alice Lowe plays Kitty Hitchings, whose life is turned upside down when her daughter Shirley appears to have attracted the attention of a poltergeist named Donald. Paul Simpson caught up with her to discuss the case…

How did you first get caught up with Simon Barnard and Bafflegab?

I think they just asked me to do something. They’re quite an intimate little group and once they know that you’re interested and that you enjoy doing it and that they like working with you, they ask you again and again. I love doing this kind of thing anyway because you come in and get to enter a whole world but do it in quite a quick time. I love horror, I love anything genre based.

I think they called me in once and I was like ‘I love this stuff (laughs), I really enjoy it’ and they were like ‘Alright, we’ll carry on getting you in then’. So yes, I’ve done quite a few things with them.

You’ve done a couple of Mark Morris’ scripts, particularly Blood on Satan’s Claw, which I’ve listened to a couple of times and it still creeps me out, far more than the movie did.

Really? I think there’s just something about sound, isn’t there? It just worms its way in and it’s really effective, all the scary stuff that they do. It’s very insidious, it gets into your brain.

Which is sort of a link into the subject of The Battersea Poltergeist because a lot of what’s going on for the family were the knocking and the sounds and everything like that. Had you heard of the case before?

No, I thought it was fictional. I actually know [creator] Danny [Robins] because I’ve worked in comedy. He’s someone I’ve known for a long time but did not associate him with ghosts necessarily; I hadn’t listened to his other podcast [Haunted].

When I looked at the script, I came in going ‘So this is fiction, right?’ I thought it was like Ghostwatch. I thought he’d made it up but based on real stories. He said, ‘Oh no, this is real’. I’d never heard of this; that makes this even more creepy.

Then I was [wondering], “Are we almost having a séance by even making this, reviving Donald by doing this?” At the time, if there was any kind of technical hitch we all went ‘Oh Donald, it’s Donald!’ which was quite fun, especially because we were recording in such a strange way. We were in isolated booths in the studio and you wouldn’t normally be that much by yourself. That by itself was quite strange and creepy and disjointed.

It’s interesting you say that because one of the things that the real Shirley has actually said is that she doesn’t want this to bring Donald back. That moment made me believe her because she was so genuinely scared of this coming back and you don’t fake that terror.

No.

Have you played real people before? As opposed to fictionalised versions.

No, I don’t think I have. I’ve played some comedy versions – I’ve played Madonna and stuff like that – but no one was expecting me to get it right necessarily. It’s supposed to be a heightened version of that person. So no, that was a first for me.

Did that change how you approached it?

Not really. Because I hadn’t met Shirley, I just felt that the best way to serve it is to just make sure there’s as much truth in the emotions as possible because you’re never going to be exactly that person.

I think it’s more about serving the story so that there isn’t an untrue representation of that person. As long as you’re serving the story truly and that person’s emotions, you’re not going to be making them seem like they’re a hysterical person or a liar or anything like that. There was nothing like that in the story, I think it was so well written and dramatized that I wasn’t worried about that. I trusted what was in the script.

Did you have just the drama sections or did you see any of the other material?

We would see the top and tail of scenes, maybe some of Danny’s dialogue or presenting bits. We’d get little snippets but really that was it, we only saw the dramatized bits.

Danny was there all along, listening to us record and every now and then we’d ask him questions about stuff, like whether something really happened.

Yes, there’s some very unbelievable stuff in there – like the séance and the police crashing in. Before you started doing it, when you first came in and knew it was true, did you have any thoughts about whether you believed it or not and did that change as you worked on it?

Alma Fielding

It didn’t really change. I have very fluid thoughts about ghosts where I can totally believe it and then I can totally not believe it. I just actually read The Haunting of Alma Fielding [by Kate Summerscale, about another true case] and that has a very interesting psychological take on it. It’s a manifestation of people’s psychology and I think that’s what I believe: people believe, so there’s something in it. It’s a manifestation of problems that are happening within a family or a household or an individual but it doesn’t mean that it’s not real.

I don’t think I went in with any judgement. I don’t think I went in going, “This is a load of rubbish” because I’m open and interested in this stuff anyway. I write horror and I’m always interested in finding out different ways of thinking about it.

What really dawned on me with things like the Alma Fielding case is how the nature of poltergeists have changed. It used to be very domestic but you don’t get stories of poltergeists that much now. But pre-War there was a big explosion of it and it was to do with a lot of domestic frustration and boredom, and people trapped in situations where they were repressing a lot, basically. There was a lot of anxiety and tension, and I just wonder if the nature of hauntings has changed and that reflects how it comes from human beings really, a lot of this stuff.

That isn’t to say it’s not real but it’s more the nature of stuff changing because it’s coming from the psyche of a nation or what’s happening politically or emotionally, which I think is really fascinating.

My mother recalled that her mother’s father couldn’t talk about the Great War but all she remembered was him coming back completely covered in lice. But he never ever spoke about anything.

They didn’t have any therapy or anything like that, that would be it. You come back and you’re just supposed to get on with it.

What was the most challenging aspect for you of playing Kitty?

I think the most challenging thing is making sure there’s a modernity to the emotions, that you’re not stereotyping that character into the past just because they did live in the past. Trying to apply yourself to that person’s experience.

As we were saying, we’re talking about the post War period – how do you identify with that? I just wanted to make sure that she was a real person and not just a stereotype of someone you’d see in a film.

I wanted to make sure they were a real family and that there was a sense of a vulnerability to them, to Kitty, that a mum now might identify with. She’s just struggling to keep the house together and deal with these strange events that are happening.

When it’s a part like that, that is so near and yet so far in many ways, is that harder to play than someone who’s a straight historical character like, for the sake of argument, Queen Elizabeth I?

Well, I suppose, it’s a bit like anything: you can take many more liberties with something the longer ago it happened and that person isn’t alive anymore to go, ‘Eh, hang on it’s not like that and that never happened.’

So, yes I think it is harder, definitely. I’m writing a biopic at the moment and that’s very tricky because on the one hand you’ve got to make a story that is interesting for someone to watch so you have to dramatize it to a certain extent, but then how many liberties do you take with that person’s real life? So yes, it’s really tricky (laughs). I don’t know how quickly I’ll be doing that again. It’s so much harder than writing a completely fictional piece where you can do whatever you want.

it is a fine line to walk, without alienating the people who want it totally accurate or totally true to the drama, I suppose.

Yes and you’re always fighting the difference between initiated horror fans or people who are real experts on the supernatural and people who are coming to something completely new and they have no interest in it. For them, you have to give enough of a beginner’s guide to what’s going on, whereas an expert might be much more like ‘Well, this is not nuanced enough for me’. That’s quite a difficult one when you’re talking about genre because you can alienate real fans.

What interested you in horror in the first place? Was there a specific thing you saw or read?

(Laughs) Not really, I just was a bit of a horror nut when I was a kid and a teenager. I watched whatever I could get my hands on – all the Hammer horrors, the late night Dracula and monster films and Doctor Who and all of that stuff.

I guess when I was younger there weren’t horror films that won Oscars like there are now. It was more like a dirty habit that you had to keep secret (laughs) if you liked horror. It was almost unusual that you might say that you liked horror.

So it’s something that I was into and then I got asked to do a comedy show with Richard Ayoade and Matt Holness – they were doing this spoof horror character called Garth Marenghi. They were just asking me as an actress to come along and be in this. They’d quite often be talking about horror stuff and I’d be like, ‘What’s that one? Oh yeah, I’ve seen that’ and they were like ‘How have you seen all this stuff?’ Because I was a girl, I don’t think they expected me to have watched and read all this (laughs).

As a kid I read all Roald Dahl, Tales of the Unexpected, every ghost book in the library.

Dennis Wheatley?

Oh yes, I’d be reading all of that when I was a kid. Daphne du Maurier and all of that and thinking nothing of it. I think they were surprised but Don’t Look Now, The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, they were all my favourite films.

It’s very nice to be able to make a profession out of stuff that you enjoy doing.

Yes absolutely.

 

The Battersea Poltergeist is a Radio 4 podcast produced by Bafflegab Productions, available on BBC Sounds